E3 2013: PS4’s The Witness Is Abstract, Non-Linear, Strange

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Attempting a most puzzling adventure.

By Colin Moriarty

After seeing famed indie developer Jonathan Blow play his new game The Witness for well over a half an hour, it’s hard to know exactly what to make of it. It’s abstract, bizarre, and – above all else – truly different. Then again, you’d expect nothing else from the man who gave the world something like Braid. What’s hard to say at this point is whether the game strikes the right balance between being weird and being innovative, or if it’s too much of the former for its own good.

Blow talks about his game with exceptional authority and confidence, and it’s blatantly obvious that he believes in what he’s delivering. Thankfully, what he’s delivering is truly different and thoughtful. The Witness is, in essence, an open-world, non-linear game that lacks all of the trappings of titles that usually carry those well-worn monikers.

There’s no combat, there’s no voice acting, and there’s no overt story, either. No where in the game did I see a single letter of text, nor a single button prompt. It’s in the first-person perspective, but there are no weapons. There’s a world to explore, but there are no quests. The world feels empty, but it really isn’t. It’s a sandbox to be explored at your leisure.

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Blow talks about his game with exceptional authority and confidence...

The Witness revolves almost strictly around navigating a mysterious island while solving puzzles whenever you feel like it. These puzzles are all the same in premise, but they differ wildly in context. In their most basic form, the puzzles are flattened squares with mazes imprinted on them. Players are expected to solve these puzzles by tracing lines from the beginning of the mazes to the end, and while the puzzles start out in an elementary fashion, they quickly build into far more difficult mind-benders that will require careful thought.

That’s because the very act of solving these puzzles requires players to learn as they go without the assistance of overt instruction. There are no tutorials. The Witness is designed to teach you as you go, to instruct you without you knowing you’re being instructed. There’s an undeniable genius in what Blow is attempting with The Witness. The game crescendos at a glacial pace, slowly throwing in variations of the same, basic maze puzzles, ones that become extremely difficult to deal with as previous puzzles ultimately teach you new rules to carry over to the next.

A look at the world.

So, for instance, while solving some of these puzzles early on requires nothing more than simple tracing, more complicated maze puzzles will have multiple endings, and clues in the environment – some more obvious than others – will instruct you on which of those endings is the proper one.

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There's no in-game text, nor are there tutorials.

At one point, Blow moved into a meadow with some apple trees. The branches of those apple trees mimic the maze patterns on nearby puzzles, with a lone apple on each tree prompting you to select the proper route. The player is expected to perceive this connection without ever being told; indeed, the player is expected to be incredibly observant throughout the experience. Without ever seeing the connection between those mazes and the nearby apple trees, there would simply be no way of solving the puzzles at hand, apart from completely unsatisfying trial-and-error.

Another set of puzzles took place in and around a crumbling house. The puzzles outside of the house gave no inclination as to which path through their mazes were the proper ones, that is until player observes the puzzles from within the ruins of the home. It’s there that strategically placed rubble gives you a precise glimpse of certain routes through those puzzles, allowing you to go outside and solve them with this new, previously unknown perspective in mind.

The mysterious island.

Sound strange? Well, The Witness most certainly is. Built on Blow’s proprietary game engine and crafted with help from developers hailing from the likes of Zipper Interactive (SOCOM) and Guerrilla Games (Killzone), this unusual adventure draws inspiration from many places, but remains decidedly indie. Its open-endedness isn’t its unique property; it’s what the game does with that open-endedness that makes it different.

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…it’s what the game does with that open-endedness that makes it different.

Then again, The Witness also comes off as perhaps a little too cerebral and high-concept, if not completely repetitive. Blow hit the same notes many times in his presentation – he very clearly finds his game very smart and he revels in his ability to seamlessly meld together the adventure genre with a non-linear approach – but the game also required a great deal of explanation that players simply won’t have when they finally get their hands on a PlayStation 4 and play for themselves.

There’s little doubt this is a game that will hit the right notes with a certain audience, but there’s also little doubt that The Witness may not make sense to a wide swath of players. When you have to explain that your game is designed not to explain everything to you, when that’s not simply a given, you may have a problem.

The distant laser indicates that a region's puzzles have been completed.

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The Witness also comes off as perhaps a little too cerebral and high-concept...

Still, The Witness is unlike anything you’ve seen or played before, a bold title with a simple approach made far more complicated by the puzzles you’re expected to complete over and over again. And since the game’s world (which contains distinct locations ranging from a forest and a lake to a mountain and a castle) can be explored and completed in just about any order, it’s almost certainly going to prove to be an experience that is what you make of it. There’s a deeper story told through hidden collectibles and the like, but The Witness, like Journey, Datura or Flower, could tell you any number of tales.

The Witness never dares to tell you how to feel, or even what to do. It instead instructs you what’s expected in subdued and understated ways, something that’s unlikely to resonate with folks who demand a narrative, high production values and a set purpose. But The Witness’ heady approach, calm pace and lack of an inventory or objectives list is undeniably intriguing, especially when paired with other PlayStation 4 launch-window titles like Killzone: Shadow Fall, Infamous: Second Son, Knack, and DriveClub. It’s not as pretty as those games, but it's more unconventional than all of them combined.

If anything, The Witness’ completely abstract approach demands respect, and commands a sort of attention that a generic shooter or action game simply doesn’t. I’m interested in learning more about it, in seeing more of it, and ultimately playing it for myself. It’s then that I suspect I’ll come to appreciate what The Witness is trying to do, since it’s so obviously a game that relies on mood and ambience to tell its tale far more than traditional storytelling.

Colin Moriarty is IGN’s Senior Editor. You can follow him on Twitter and IGN and learn just how sad the life of a New York Islanders and New York Jets fan can be.